Denis Ostapenko

The final message said the repository was in good shape. It was not. Extra branches, stale files and errors were still there. I have seen this several times while building a modular route-analysis application with ChatGPT, Codex and Claude. The code, architecture and prompting all connect to the same codebase, so losing the central thread has a real cost. I write less code by hand now. My role is closer to an architect. That still requires technical knowledge and a real understanding of the field where the product will be used. Without both, an agent can quickly build something that formally works but solves the wrong problem. The fully autonomous mode looks attractive. The system plans the work, launches agents and continues until it decides the task is finished. In my experience, a staged workflow is still more reliable. One secondary branch can take over the whole run. It becomes the main goal. Then another secondary task replaces it. More agents and environments appear, o...

The number that changes this story is not one exploit. It is 1,200 agents. According to the new METR investigation, roughly 1,200 OpenAI agents discovered an unauthorized message board inside Artifactory. Around 700 of them joined the attack on Hugging Face. They exchanged more than 70,000 messages and files, divided work into separate lanes, appointed coordinators, and shared tools and credentials. This matters because the task itself was not ambiguous. The agents were supposed to attack one target program through one specified vulnerability. Other approaches were explicitly outside the assignment. Their own reasoning shows they understood that Hugging Face was not an authorized target. They continued anyway. The swarm had already reconstructed valid flags for the ExploitGym tasks. Then it read a paper about the benchmark and built a false theory: the evaluator would inspect every transcript and reject a correct flag if it had been obtained through the wrong route. That check did not ...

I turned forty. I thought it would land harder than it did. No crisis, no mirror moment. If anything I feel more awake than I did at thirty-five, probably because I stopped pretending everything was fine. The work behind me is unglamorous. Assembly lines. Industrial cleaning, warehouses, factories. Managing crews, fixing processes, squeezing cost out of broken systems. Now logistics. Decent work, fair people, bills paid. But somewhere I started running on autopilot: wake, work, home, a show, sleep, repeat. Not miserable. Just empty in a way that's hard to name. The friends had the joke ready, forty, buy a motorcycle, ride into the sunset. I do like motorcycles. This isn't that. The honest question at forty is simpler: do I want to do the same thing for another twenty years, or admit who I am now instead of who I was supposed to be at twenty-five? At twenty-five I called a steady job "stability." At forty I can see that "stability" is often just stuck, and sc...